Sunday, 28 February 2016

Last week Dr Jonathan Hughes visited the Politecnico di Milano, Italy's largest technical university, to deliver a two-day workshop on Research Ethics.

The workshop was part of a new, week-long course attended by PhD students in bioengineering, architecture, construction, nuclear and renewable energy, management, industrial and chemical engineering, preservation of built heritage, design and many other fields.

The invitation came about as a result of Dr Hughes's work as editor and co-author, with other members of the Centre for Professional Ethics, of the European Textbook on Ethics in Research, published by the European Commission.

This one-day research workshop aims to bring together academics in the fields of bioethics, sociology, law, and other relevant disciplines working on the concept of ‘disordering’ (pathologisation or medicalisation), in order to explore the nature of the concept and its implications.

Although the primary aim is to explore the concept of disordering, we are also interested in the process whereby a characteristic, state or condition is conceived of as a disorder potentially for positive (i.e. to get access to support) or negative (i.e. to imprison/control) reasons. This could include temporary states, such as pregnancy; temporal states, such as end-of-life; anatomical difference, such as intersex; gender difference (trans); and psychological or neurological differences, such as autism.

The workshop will be hosted by the Centre for Professional Ethics at Keele University on Wednesday, 25 May 2016.

Please send anonymised abstracts of no more than 350 words to Holly Smith at EODKeele@gmail.com by Friday, 8 April 2016.

Programme decisions will be made by 15 April and you will be informed by email if your abstract has been accepted.